How to set up your Product Documentation?

If you’ve ever worked with Engineering, Design, and Business Teams, you’d know how difficult it gets to maintain various team members in different functions to be on the same page while building Product Modules or Features.

I’ve frequently observed Engineering and Design teams getting frustrated with the last-minute scope changes brought up by the Product Teams and the Product teams getting equally frustrated with the final deliverable from the Design or Engineering teams being not what was discussed as part of the scope or missing a lot of edge cases and corner scenarios.

In a Multi-Product organization, we’ve already discussed in the previous series of articles, the complexity involved in tracking, monitoring, and measurement of Product results across all Products. Another level of challenge arises in bringing all stakeholders together on the next set of Features to be built in a multi-product stack scenario.

For managing Product development efforts across the Product Stack of an organization, you’d need to employ tools or methods to document each initiative, or feature.

In this long-form series of articles, I’d discuss the process of setting up, customizing, and documenting your Product Initiatives, and Features to manage this process of building Products end to end and bring consensus on your Product roadmap.

I’ve divided this long-form essay into the following sections such that if you go through this sequence of articles over some time, you’ll be able to use them as a guiding principle to implement your own Product Documentation. Additionally, you could skip over to the part that’s relevant to you if you’ve already done some of the sequential steps mentioned here.

1. In the first section, we’ll discuss how to set up the structure of your Documentation Management in a way that documentation for Products is optimized for creation, extension, and discovery and compare different Documentation tools to arrive at a framework for the best tool selection along with a brief on the various types of documents
2. In the second section, we’ll discuss how to break down an Initiative into a Program by writing a Program document with your Business Team
3. In the third section, we’ll discuss how to break down and bring up a new Feature to fruition by writing a Product One Pager document for your Business and Design Teams
4. In the fourth section, we’ll discuss how to create a data flow diagram to hand over the correct requirement to your downstream stakeholders
5. In the fifth section, we’ll discuss how to write an elaborate Product Requirement Document on the basis of the One Pager and the Designs created for your Engineering Team
6. In the sixth section, we’ll discuss how to write a Product Instrumentation Document for your Features that would highlight all the events of importance to track in your Product
7. In the seventh section, we’ll discuss how to write a Business Requirement Document for your Business Teams to write briefs for your internal or partner-type products for quick features to be built

If you go through this above-mentioned step-by-step process, you’ll be able to master Product Development and Documentation in a matter of weeks.

I’ve also linked the free templates of all the document types that I’ve come up with throughout my experience in Product —

1. Program Document
2. Product One-Pager Document
3. Product Requirement Document
4. Product Instrumentation Document
5. Business Requirement Document

So, let’s dive straight in with the first section.

Do share your feedback with me at kshitj.saxena@gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn